With a legacy of being outspoken, or, as she likes to put it, ‘just saying things’, Lily Allen has stopped sniping at other celebrities – well, for the most part – and is instead talking about what it’s like to be a woman in the industry these days.
Last November, she released a song addressing feminist issues Hard Out Here contained lyrics such as ‘inequality promises that it’s here to stay’ and ‘there’s a glass ceiling to break’. It was a very catchy ditty covering the sort of topic that, five years ago, would only be in the mainstream when Germaine Greer turned up on Celebrity Big Brother. But then, as we all remember, there was a big furore because the video featured a bunch of partially-nude black women twerking. The argument went that, though Lily was trying to parody the racist misogyny in music videos, she was just repeating it.
She's now spoken about how upset some of the negative feedback made her: ‘I understand people will have their point of view and will interpret things in the way they want to. But it was upsetting to get some of that feedback.’
It was particularly upsetting because she felt she’d gone to a lot of trouble to dance in front of a series of balloons spelling out ‘Lily Allen has a baggy pussy’. ‘I felt like I was being brave doing the baggy pussy thing, and that got lost,' she told Elle. 'That was meant to be the feminist moment. It was a brave thing to do – say that you have an enormous vagina!’
By the same token, she is all for women being outspoken: ‘Women are still expected, in some weird way, to kind of sit there and look pretty, and not talk. So often, when women say things that are outspoken, or, as I call it, just saying things, people jump on that and try to make us look stupid for having an opinion,' she says. 'That doesn’t happen with men. Come on, we’ve done feminism. People are aware of it. Can it just happen now?’
Unfortunately, the line of the interview which has gained the most traction is the one where Lily reacts to a question about the pressure put on women to conform to certain standards of beauty: ‘Of course I’d rather look like Kate Moss than look like myself’ – cue lots of photos of Lily and Kate Moss hanging out at the GQ awards back in 2009 and lots of online commenters comparing the two.
It definitely is hard out here...
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.